The Da Vinci Code: Fact Or Fiction?

cryptic messages

We all know that Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer, and that he made great advancements in the fields of military tactics, biology and geology. But he was also a very quirky individual.

All of his artwork goes beyond the obvious; the characters in his paintings appear to have their own stories, separate from what's being portrayed. Just what is the "Mona Lisa" smiling about anyway? Why all the activity in "The Last Supper"? These questions, studied in depth in The Da Vinci Code , have been the subject of many inquiries in the field of art history.

Since da Vinci wasn't as devout a Christian as his contemporaries, some believe that he inserted subliminal subversive messages or secret puzzles into his seemingly religious paintings. Case in point: da Vinci wrote in mirror script (backwards) in his notebooks to ensure that his findings would not be easily readable.

priory of sion

What Dan Brown suggests in The Da Vinci Code is that the cryptic messages in da Vinci's artwork led to a secret that was defended for a millennium by a society identified as the Priory of Sion. But does such a society really exist?

Controversy has been surrounding this group since 1975, when a group of Parisian librarians at the Bibliotheque Nationale made a startling discovery. They found parchments, known as Les Dossiers Secrets , in which notable figures such as Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Leonardo da Vinci, and French President Francois Mitterrand were said to be secret members of the Priory of Sion.

According to these parchments, the Priory of Sion is a secret society founded in 1090 by Godefroi de Bouillon, under the name Ordre de Sion . Apparently, the objective of the organization was to restore the Merovingian bloodline to the thrones of Europe, during a time when royal wars were commonplace.

However, another theory states that it was a friendly society created in the 1950s by Pierre Plantard, and that the documents discovered in 1975 were created to make it seem more noble.

Yet another hypothesis suggests that it was a hoax created by Surrealist artist Jean Cocteau as a form of performance art.